Worlding Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal Bridging Knowledges, Practices, and Beings

 

Morning Coffee | Registration

9:00 am-9:30 am

Ohèn:ton Karihwatéhkwen | Opening Address – Elder Amelia Tekwatonti McGregor, Kanien’keha:ka
Words of Welcome – Annie Gérin, Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University
Opening Remarks – Paul Goodwin and Ming Tiampo, Co-PI’s, Worlding Public Cultures

Paul Goodwin is a professor and UAL Chair of Contemporary Art & Urbanism and Director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity & Nation (TrAIN) at University of the Arts London. Goodwin’s research and curatorial practice focuses on African diaspora and Black British art (since the 1980s); global curating and critical museologies; and critical approaches to transnationalism in contemporary art. 

​Ming Tiampo is Professor of Art History, and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University. Tiampo’s major projects include Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Gutai: Splendid Playground co-curated at the Guggenheim Museum in NY (2013), and Jin-me Yoon (Art Canada Institute, 2022). Her current book Transversal Modernism/s: The Slade School of Fine Art, reimagines transcultural intersections through global microhistory.

9:30 am-11:00 am

SESSION 1 – Worlding Diasporic and Transcultural Art (Histories)

​Alice Ming Wai Jim, Concordia University (WPC Montreal)
​Worlding Tiohtià:ke/Montreal

​WPC 2023’s overall goal is announced through our eponymous colloquium title: to braid the ongoing and future work of the WPC project into the Tiohtià:ke/Montréal context by asking our central question: How are local museums, artist-run centers and universities starting to address, if not representing, global, transnational, transcultural, and decolonial public narratives in and of this cosmopolitan city—to itself and to international audiences? The different components in our project title are intended to foreground and weave together, on the one hand, the ongoing interests of the WPC project to exchange and bridge knowledges on how to decolonize museums and the discipline of art history, and, on the other hand, profoundly recognize that, in contrast to previous meetings in Europe, the work of WPC 2023 in Tiohtià:ke will be taking place on the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá:ka and that Indigenous, Black, Asian, and other racialized communities (BIPOC) continue to contest ongoing colonial conditions as a legacy of hundreds of years of cultural genocide, enslavement, and indentured servitude under colonial rule and racialized capitalism. The program thus prioritizes research by BIPOC early career researchers and cultural workers, with careful attention to different ways of feeling, knowing, and working and local relationalities between communities, sites, and fields. 

Art historian and curator Alice Ming Wai Jim is Professor of Contemporary Art History at Concordia University and founding editor-in-chief of the journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas published by Brill. Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories 2017-2022, she is PI for the WPC Montreal team.

Analays Alvarez Hernandez, Université de Montréal (WPC Montreal)
(Re)locations: Latinx-Canadian Art and Latin American Art in Montreal in the 21st Century

This paper will discuss the first outcomes of an ongoing research project, funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec-Société et Culture (2022-2025), which investigates the historical and current conditions of the insertion of Latin American and Latinx-Canadian artists in the Montreal art scene. It interrogates whether Latin American art’s occurrences in Montreal have either opened doors for artists from this diaspora in this city or, on the contrary, have contributed to the latter’s past and ongoing condition of a “double subalternity.” What happens when art no longer comes “directly” Latin America because their producers no longer reside there nor claim their presence anymore in their places of origin? Why is a Latinx-Canadian artist perceived differently (in Canada) than a Latin American artist who still resides and works in one of the countries that integrate this cultural region? I will answer these questions in light of the tension between de- and re-westernization in the so-called globalized art world; the role played by the art market in the construction of “Latin American art” as a market and collecting category; the relationship between (Western) modernity and coloniality of power. In short, this project seeks to analyze the way coloniality of power manifests itself in art institutions in Montreal and, most importantly, reinforce invisibility and subalternity conditions of Latinx-Canadian artists through choices of collecting, exhibitions or other initiatives that are intended to be or presented as (more) culturally inclusive.

Analays Alvarez Hernandez is an art historian and independent curator. Her research focuses on contemporary art, with an emphasis on public art, global art histories and diasporas, Latinx-Canadian art, and curating. She joined the faculty at l’Université de Montréal in 2019 as Assistant Professor in the Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques.

Nuraini Juliastuti, independent scholar (WPC Amsterdam) – Virtual Presentation
Commons Museums: Non-extractive Knowledge Production for People’s Lifeline 

My research is about commons museums, a new museum which is driven by the desire to narrate the neglected and underrepresented histories. I use Pagesangan School in Wintaos Village, Yogyakarta, and Lakoat Kujawas in Taiftob Village, Mollo, East Nusa Tenggara as case studies. Using “commons museums” as a tool of theoretical inquiry, I question the established position of museums and schools as authoritative knowledge producers about heritage and futurity. Commons museums operate as long-term platforms dedicated to designing alternative schooling, methods for archiving, and mechanisms for surviving together. They produce archives and knowledge of different senses of urgency, which always evolve along with people’s lifeline inquiries. In the contexts of Pagesangan and Lakoat Kujawas, the meaning of heritage and what to inherit lies in the understanding about their precarious soils, overcoming the feeling of being extracted, and reproducing precarious knowledge. This propels the development of knowledge production which is more ethical and values non-extractive attitudes. Such a development leads to the making of creative learning platforms to archive problems and resourcefulness of their social environment. Storytelling, writing, and making creative products are parts of tools for talking back, reclaiming, repairing, and acknowledging diverse knowledge bearers. These tools generate the vernacular concepts of good life and the establishment of a specific mode of independence. Commons museums narrate the prefiguring of imagination of the communities’ future.

Nuraini Juliastuti is a trans-local researcher, focusing on independent art organizations, new archiving practices, illegality and alternative cultural production. Nuraini co-founded Kunci Study Forum & Collective based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Until December 2022, Nuraini was a member of the WPC Amsterdam team, based in the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam).

11:00 am-11:15 am

Coffee Break

11:15 am-1:00 pm

​SESSION 2 -- WPC Session

WPC Session – Keynote 
maya rae oppenheimer, Concordia University (WPC Montreal)
Pedagogy and Publishing as (worlding) Praxis

Writing - be it analytical, critical, descriptive, to name a few core moves – is an important part of art historical pedagogy. So too are the connected language-gestures of reading and editing and publishing. The question follows, certainly, of where and how to do this work, and how “worlding” complicates and informs it. My remarks will address some perspectives on the work of art publishing with consideration to the Worlding Public Cultures project and introduce an initiative developed during the same lifespan, and which received direct support from the WPC network: OK Stamp Press. I founded OK Stamp Press in 2020 to support collective projects with Montreal-based emerging artists and early-career art historians. We (contributors, project coordinators and editors) found purpose in the extension of pedagogy from past classrooms to collective book-space. OK Stamp Press now has two co-directors, myself and M. Wright, currently based in Austin, Texas, and a growing catalogue of projects that approach book-objects as not only pedagogical spaces akin to exhibition spaces but also as mobilisers of mutual aid in reader/writer communities. I will finish my remarks by considering the role of small-scale artist publishing, particularly an on-going project called “Epistolary Webs,” which received WPC support in 2022.

maya rae oppenheimer (phd) is the founder and co-director of OK Stamp Press. She’s also a daughter, sister, aunt of Icelandic and Canary Islander descent who works as an arts writer/researcher/educator. She was born in Treaty 1 Territory and is now an uninvited guest on Kanien’kehá:ka traditional lands where she preoccupies herself with writing as a social practice and the tangles of narratives that inform our worldviews.
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WPC Session – In this Conjuncture: Worlding as Process 
Moderated by Paul Goodwin, University Arts London, and Ming Tiampo, Carleton University (WPC London and Ottawa)

Over the last few years, we have been involved in a process of collaborative and speculative inquiry into what a future art infrastructure could look like that would emerge more pluriversal and equitable futures. Not limiting our work to the too often made distinctions between art and the political, between art institutions and struggles for social justice, between pedagogies and research, or between data repositories and archival practices, this has been a generative and challenging process, pushing beyond disciplinary segregation to explore and fashion new modes of thinking, being and creating in the world together. This panel comes at the end of the first phase of our inquiry. Rather than seeing this moment as a space to provide answers, we want to think through where we are at now, in this conjuncture, accounting for the always unfinished nature of this kind of labour and what horizons for future practice, for future work, we want to commit to. Worlding on this account is not an ending but is part of a staying with, of abiding by our troubled world. The panel is divided into three short collaborative presentations, each addressing how WPC has used worlding as an animating concept to interrogate artistic practices, pedagogies, and data systems.
Paul Goodwin is a professor and UAL Chair of Contemporary Art & Urbanism and Director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity & Nation (TrAIN) at University of the Arts London. Goodwin’s research and curatorial practice focuses on African diaspora and Black British art (since the 1980s); global curating and critical museologies; and critical approaches to transnationalism in contemporary art. 

Ming Tiampo is Professor of Art History, and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University. Tiampo’s major projects include Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Gutai: Splendid Playground co-curated at the Guggenheim Museum in NY (2013), and Jin-me Yoon (Art Canada Institute, 2022). Her current book Transversal Modernism/s: The Slade School of Fine Art, reimagines transcultural intersections through global microhistory.

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Pluriversal Worldings
Birgit Hopfener, Carleton University (WPC Ottawa), Ruth Phillips, Carleton University (WPC Ottawa), and Wayne Modest (WPC Amsterdam)

Birgit Hopfener is Associate Professor of Art History, current holder of the Ruth and Mark Phillips professorship and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University. 

Ruth Phillips is Professor of Art History emerita at Carleton University, Ottawa. Her work has focused on African and Indigenous North American arts, critical museology, and Indigenous modernisms. She is a former director of the UBC Museum of Anthropology and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. 

Wayne Modest is Director of Content of the National Museum of World Cultures (a museum group comprising the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, Africa Museum) and the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. He is also professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.  


Worlding Art Historical Pedagogies: Reflections from Germany 
Eva Bentcheva (WPC Heidelberg) and Franziska Koch, (WPC Heidelberg)

What does it mean to teach art history in the present? How can exchanges with museums, cultural institutions and artists inform academia and vice versa? Moreover, how can such exchanges convey an art history sensitive to de/postcolonial, transcultural and intersectional art histories? Is there a need to rethink the structure and role of syllabi in light of current discourses? In this presentation, art historians Eva Bentcheva and Franziska Koch will present findings from two recent international events organized by the Heidelberg University team of Worlding Public Cultures; the international academy, ‘Lessons Learned? Transcultural Perspectives in Curating and Pedagogies’ (Dresden, July 2022), and the workshop ‘Worlding Art History through Syllabi’ (Berlin, October 2022). Looking back upon these two events, the presenters will outline collective conclusions, challenges, as well as suggestions for practical and theoretical revisions for ‘worlding’ art historical pedagogies.

Eva Bentcheva is an art historian and curator with a focus on transnational histories of performance art and archives between South/Southeast Asia and Europe. She is currently Managing Editor and Postdoctoral Researcher for Worlding Public Cultures at Heidelberg University. She has previously held positions at Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Tate in London and SOAS University of London.

Franziska Koch is co-leading the Heidelberg Team of Worlding Public Cultures as Assistant Professor of Global Art History at Heidelberg University. Her research interests span transcultural entanglements in modern and contemporary art across North-America, Western Europe and East Asia, exhibition studies and curatorial practice, artistic collaboration, and the prospect of more “worlded” pedagogies in Art History.

Worlding Data
Paul Goodwin, University of the Arts London (WPC London), Maribel Hidalgo Urbaneja, University of the Arts London (WPC London), Janneke Van Hoeve, Carleton University (WPC Ottawa), Athanasios Velios (WPC London)

The Worlding Data panel will focus on worlding as an overarching concept in relation to the conceptualization, creation, and commencement of a database for the Worlding Public Cultures project. Developing a database in the context of this project implies the use of worlding as a concept and tool to rethink and critique the epistemological foundations of databases, ontologies, and structured vocabularies. Discussion will address the use of worlding as a concept and tool and be structured around various roles the panelists have held surrounding the database. 

Paul Goodwin is a professor and UAL Chair of Contemporary Art & Urbanism and Director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity & Nation (TrAIN) at University of the Arts London. Goodwin’s research and curatorial practice focuses on African diaspora and Black British art (since the 1980s); global curating and critical museologies; and critical approaches to transnationalism in contemporary art. He is Co-PI of Worlding Public Cultures.

Maribel Hidalgo-Urbaneja is the Worlding Public Cultures postdoctoral research fellow at the University of the Arts London. Her research interests span digital storytelling and narratology in museums and art history, and critical digital humanities approaches that seek to challenge and reimagine dominant and biased practices in the museums and galleries. 

Janneke Van Hoeve is completing her MA degree in Art and Architectural History at Carleton University, with focused studies in Digital Humanities and Migration and Diaspora. Her studies are supervised by Ming Tiampo, and she has been involved with Worlding Public Cultures since 2022. 
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Thanasis Velios is the Collections Data Manager at English Heritage working on a range of heritage-related datasets. He previously held the position of Reader in Documentation at the University of the Arts London. His research focuses on ontological modelling and the types of biases that are embedded in data ontologies. He is a member of the CIDOC-CRM Special Interest Group working towards broadening participation.

 

Lunch break

2:15 pm-4:30 pm

SESSION 3 – WPC Emerging Scholars Session

WPC Emerging Scholars Session – Keynote 

Rahila Haque, University of the Arts London (WPC London)  
There are no new stories, only the ghosts of other stories

In 1989 Maud Sulter made Zabat, a series of photographic portraits of creative Black women, each in the guise of one of the nine Greek muses. One of the sitters for the series was Dionne Sparks, a recently graduated young artist who was not only one of Sulter’s muses, but also an assistant in the production of the work. In 2021, Sparks returned to this work to begin her own series of works as a homage to Zabat and to extend the dialogue through a reversal of artist and muse. Centring this story of intergenerational practice, this presentation considers how Black feminist knowledge embodies and reverberates through aesthetic acts that are necessarily imbricated with a politics of relation and collective existence.

Rahila Haque is a curator, writer and a PhD candidate at the Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. She is a member of the Worlding Public Cultures London team.


WPC Emerging Scholars Session

Moderated by David Duhamel, Université de Montréal, and Varda Nisar, Concordia University (WPC Montreal)

The Emerging Scholars Roundtable wishes to address the research of emerging and early career scholars who have contributed to the development of Worlding Public Cultures since 2018. Through their presentations, the roundtable looks at worlded approaches present in museum studies and art history. In this context, how have the decolonial methodologies fostered by WPC influenced current research in our disciplines? How have WPC research network activities provided new avenues for the students who participate in it? How do they look back on the breakthroughs made by WPC? This roundtable is necessary to connect the various projects that are inspired by these approaches.
Moderators

David Duhamel is an MA student in art history at Université de Montréal. They have completed their art history bachelor’s degree at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal) in 2021. They have also taken part in various exhibitions by writing in booklets and catalogues. David’s research focuses mainly on representations of speciesism in contemporary Québécois art. 

Varda Nisar (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History, and Public Scholar at Concordia University. In 2015-16, she was a Arthink South Asia Fellow, and was the Head of Educational Programming for Karachi Biennale in 2017 and 2022. In 2021, she organized and convened a speaker series, (Art+Micro)History: Contemporary Artistic Voices from the South. Her current doctoral research focuses on the role that museums in Pakistan are playing in nation-building by positioning them within the global political dynamic
Presenters 

Franziska Kaun, Heidelberg University (WPC Heidelberg)
Global Perspectives. The "Museum Global" Program of the German Federal Cultural Foundation

The drive to "go global" in museum collections continues to gain momentum, and for some time now "globalization" and "global" have become buzzwords in the German museum landscape. The urgent call for an orientation toward the global is also evident in cultural policy efforts and recommendations for art museums. But what exactly is meant by a global orientation or perspective? In my research, I analyze the "Museum Global" program of the German Federal Cultural Foundation as a case study from Germany. Initiated in 2015, the "Museum Global" program was conceived as a forward-looking field of experimentation for museums: new presentations of the four respective collections were to be developed that put them in a "global perspective." What the participating institutions have in common is that they possess collections of "classical modernism". However, the exhibition concepts that have emerged in this process differ greatly from one another. In my presentation, I will briefly discuss the theoretical framework on concepts of the "global" with which I am examining these projects and how it relates to the idea of ‘worlding’. Furthermore, I will provide insights into the different exhibition strategies that have been realized in the four museums in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Munich.

Franziska Kaun has an MA degree in Art History and Museology from Heidelberg University and the École du Louvre in Paris and is currently a doctoral student at Heidelberg University under the supervision of Monica Juneja. Since 2020, she is part of the Heidelberg Team of WPC.

Moritz Schwörer, Heidelberg University (WPC Heidelberg)
Approaches to Digital Participation in Art Museums

My ongoing doctoral project explores how art museums can use the internet and its digital communication tools to enable online users to participate in the substantive work of these institutions. A particular focus of this research is the question of whether activating online users beyond them posting photos of their museum visits or giving likes on social media is at all practicable in the art field. Is it possible to involve the audience in the processes of museum and exhibition making through online tools, as it is already a common practice in crowd-sourcing projects in natural science or local history museums, for example? Can art museums, too, benefit from the knowledge and expertise of online communities, and at the same time, can previously underrepresented voices find a way into the museum via these channels? The dissertation explores these questions through a series of case studies of participatory projects from various international art museums, some of which are presented in this paper.

Moritz Schwörer is an art historian and part of the German WPC team based at Heidelberg University. He is currently working on his dissertation project on digital participation in art museums, which is supervised by Monica Juneja. His other research interests include curating art in social media and pop and internet culture in general.

Seung Hee Kim, Heidelberg University (WPC Heidelberg)
Orchestrated Ambiguity of Exhibiting the “Global” in Calais

Calais, a port city in France, is a liminal space for refugees who arrive from conflict zones and are seeking asylum in the U.K. Working with Collectif Zirlib as co-curator of an upcoming “global” exhibition in Calais, I research a subset of questions about migration, art practice, nationhood, and situational ethics. The exhibition will consist of national pavilions to reflect the home countries of refugees, who will be invited to make artwork and receive payment for their artistic labor. Artists will have complete freedom over their artistic practice and output. These works by refugee artists will be exhibited in respective national pavilions adjacent to works from the collection of the Louvre-Lens Museum. Calais city council’s pejorative approach to refugees impedes with any proclivity to clearly define the objectives of the exhibition. The exhibition is purposefully devised as a highly unpredictable situation whereby considerable creative agency is delegated to refugees who are insistently kept outside of the artistic establishment. Can planned ambiguities ultimately emphasize certain aspects of legibly political art that does not spell out its political goals? In anticipation of ethical confrontations with representation, I explore the discursive positionings of refugee as artist, curator as deviser, institution as benefactor, and visitors as voyeurs. 
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Seung Hee Kim is a DAAD-supported MA student of Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University. In 2021, she performed at the Centre Pompidou with Collectif Zirlib. She held curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum, New Museum, and Columbia University. Her research centers on visual practices that engage with dependency theory.

 

Break

5:00 pm-6:30 pm

​SESSION 4 – re* CiCA Artist Roundtable
Presented in collaboration with Conversations in Contemporary Art (CiCA), FOFA Gallery, and EAHR|Media’s South-South, Critiques of Global South CISSC Working Group. Followed by reception and visiting the exhibition at FOFA Gallery (in Concordia's EV building).

re* exhibition artists rudy aker, Pansee Atta, Amin Rehman, and Swapnaa Tamhane, in conversation with WPC Montreal exhibition co-curators Manar Abo Touk, Concordia University, Lorraine Doucet-Sisto, Université du Québec à Montréal, and Varda Nisar, Concordia University. 

How do different creative practices and experiences help us reimagine different approaches to worldmaking? Artists rudi aker, Pansee Atta, Amin Rehman, and Swapnaa Tamhane explore artistic processes through their mixed-media works that allow for remaking and rebuilding the worlds around us.  

Artists

rudi aker is a wolastoqew auntie, artist, organizer, and curator from St. Mary’s First Nation in Sitansisk (Fredericton, New Brunswick) and, for now, a guest on Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang (Montreal, Quebec). Their artistic and research practices center relationality, placehood, and visibility, with a focus on the traversal of (un)colonized spaces through conceptions of counter-cartographies and barrier-breaking.

Pansee Atta is an Egyptian-Canadian artist, researcher, and curator whose practice takes a decolonial approach to cultural archives, particularly the Middle East and Egypt. Her art has been exhibited across Canada and abroad, and her doctoral research unpacks the ways that Egyptian repatriative efforts have shaped understandings of Pharaonic objects.

Amin Rehman is a multidisciplinary visual artist who has been working since the1980s. Originally from Pakistan, he studied at the historic National College of Arts and the University of Punjab in Lahore. He received an MA from the University of Windsor, Ontario in 2011. He was honored with SAVAC’s (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) “Artist of the Year Award” in 2005.

Swapnaa Tamhane is an artist, writer, and curator. Her visual practice is dedicated to drawing, making handmade paper, and working with the material histories of cotton and jute. Her interests extend to material culture, and with designer Rashmi Varma, she wrote SĀR: The Essence of Indian Design (Phaidon Press, 2016). She has an MFA in Fibres & Material Practices, Concordia University, where she is currently an Artist-in-Residence. 

Curators

Manar Abo Touk (she/her) is a Syrian-born Canadian independent art curator and a PhD student in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. Her dissertation project focuses on contemporary Syrian art post 2011. Specifically, it analyzes displacement on diasporic identities through artists in Canada, Germany, and France. Manar’s most recent positions were as the Arts Manager and Curator at Al Riwaq Art Space in the Kingdom of Bahrain, and the Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Alberta.

Lorraine Doucet Sisto is an Art History MA student at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She is a research assistant and curator for Worlding Public Cultures. Lorraine works as a research assistant on Professor Edith-Anne Pageot’s research project, Une géographie des réseaux de production et de diffusion de la fibre dans l’art moderne et contemporain au Québec, contributing to mapping the history of textile arts in Quebec.
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Varda Nisar (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Public Scholar at Concordia University. In 2015-16, she was a Arthink South Asia Fellow, and was the Head of Educational Programming for Karachi Biennale in 2017 and 2022. In 2021, she organized and convened a speaker series, (Art+Micro)History: Contemporary Artistic Voices from the South. Her current doctoral research focuses on the role that museums in Pakistan are playing in nation-building by positioning them within the global political dynamic

​re* is part of the Worlding Tiohtià:ke/Montreal: Bridging Knowledges, Practices, and Beings / Mondes de Tiohtià:ke/Montréal : Mettre en relation les savoirs, les pratiques et les êtres colloquium and takes place in two venues at Concordia University’s Sir George Williams Campus: the FOFA Art Gallery, 1515 Sainte-Catherine St. West, EV 1-715, 9 March through 1 June 2023, and the Webster Library vitrines, 2nd floor, 1400 Maisonneuve Blvd West, LB-2F, 30 March through 1 June 2023.

 

Morning Coffee | Registration

9:30 am-11:00 am

​SESSION 5 – Museums: Better Practices, Better Futures
Alice Ming Wai Jim, Concordia University (WPC Montreal) and Jonathan Shaughnessy, National Gallery of Canada (WPC Ottawa), in conversation with:
Paul Goodwin, University Arts London (WPC London) 
eunice bélidor, Concordia University
Abigail Celis, Université de Montréal
Jennifer Carter, Université du Québec à Montréal

Speaking from experience or fieldnotes, what have been some better practices for museums in relation to culturally diverse communities, decolonizing institutions, and social injustice?

Art historian and curator Alice Ming Wai Jim is Professor of Contemporary Art History at Concordia University and founding editor-in-chief of the journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas published by Brill. Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories 2017-2022, she is PI for the WPC Montreal team.

Jonathan Shaughnessy is Director, Curatorial Initiatives at the National Gallery of Canada and completing his PhD student in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University, Ottawa. Interested in intersections between modern and contemporary art histories, his research explores the worlding of global narratives within national collections and museums. He is presently working with artist Deanna Bowen on her upcoming exhibition The Black Canadians (After Cooke) (2022) and is co-project director with curator Gaëtane Verna for the 2024 Venice Biennale Canada Pavilion featuring artist Kapwani Kiwanga.

In conversation with

Paul Goodwin is a professor and UAL Chair of Contemporary Art & Urbanism and Director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity & Nation (TrAIN) at University of the Arts London. Goodwin’s research and curatorial practice focuses on African diaspora and Black British art (since the 1980s); global curating and critical museologies; and critical approaches to transnationalism in contemporary art. He is Co-PI of Worlding Public Cultures.
Born and based in Montreal, eunice bélidor is a curator, letter-writer, critic and researcher, and Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. Her practice currently focuses on design, curatorial care, and correspondence. She is the 2018 recipient of The TD Bank Group Awards for Emerging Curators from the Hnatyshyn Foundation. Recent positions include as Director of articule and FOFA Gallery, and Curator of Contemporary Canadian and Québécois art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Abigail E. Celis is an assistant professor in Art History and Museum Studies at the Université de Montréal. Her work examines the afterlives of colonialism in Francophone visual cultures and the politics of nation and decolonization in French cultural institutions. Her current projects include research on the ethics of restitution and repair in museum practice and contemporary arts.
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Jennifer Carter is Professor of New Museologies, Intangible Heritage and Cultural Objects in the Department of Art History and graduate Museology program at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her research investigates the global phenomenon of human rights museology and considers how historical and social justice are negotiated curatorially and pedagogically in cultural institutions dedicated to human rights in different geopolitical contexts around the world. 

 

11:00 am-11:15 am

Coffee Break

 

SESSION 6 – Counter-archives: The Making of Art Histories/ Contre-archives, concevoir autrement les histoires de l’art
​Edith-Anne Pageot, Université du Québec à Montréal (WPC Montreal) and May Chew, Concordia University (WPC Montreal) in conversation with:
Maribel Hidalgo Urbaneja, University Arts London (WPC London)
Carmen Robertson, Carleton University (WPC Ottawa) 
Carine Zaayman (WPC Amsterdam)

Official archives constitute a certain order of things. They recognize and, at the same time, disqualify knowledges. If Ann Laura Stoler (2010) invites us to read colonial archives “in the interstices of what goes without saying and what should not be said,” what can we learn from counter-archival practices? How might counter-archives, which can include personal archives, storytelling, oral traditions, digital ephemera, and other audio-visual materials, disrupt hegemonic discourses and impact data classification, nomenclature, research and creative methodologies, understandings of time, and hierarchies of value? How can counter-archives shape new stories?

Specializing in modernisms within Quebec and Canada, Edith-Anne Pageot is a professor at the Department of Art History at UQAM. Aiming on decentralized epistemologies, her research focuses on the transcultural and transnational logics that envelope modes of producing and exhibiting artistic and craft objects. She is a member of IREF, CRILCQ and CIERA. In collaboration with a team of Indigenous and settler researchers, she co-developed the first French MOOC course on Indigenous arts ‘Ohtehra' l'art autochtone aujourd'hui’

In conversation with

May Chew is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies and Art History at Concordia University. Her work appears in Imaginations, the International Journal of Heritage Studies, the Journal of Canadian Art History, Frames Cinema Journal and an issue of the journal PUBLIC on the theme of “Archives/Counter-Archives,” co-edited with Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord.

Scots-Lakota scholar Carmen Robertson holds the Tier I Canada Research Chair in North American Indigenous Visual and Material Culture at Carleton University. In 2016 she published Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau: Art and the Colonial Narrative in the Canadian Media (UMP) and Norval Morrisseau: Life and Work (ACI). Robertson is the PI for The Morrisseau Project: 1955-1985. 

Maribel Hidalgo-Urbaneja is the Worlding Public Cultures postdoctoral research fellow at the University of the Arts London. Her research interests span digital storytelling and narratology in museums and art history, and critical digital humanities approaches that seek to challenge and reimagine dominant and biased practices in the museums and galleries. 

Carine Zaayman is an artist, curator and scholar committed to critical engagement with colonial archives, specifically those holding strands of Khoekhoe pasts in South Africa. She is a Senior Researcher and Research Coordinator at the RCMC (https://www.materialculture.nl). She convenes the project Under Cover of Darkness (http://undercoverofdarkness.co.za) which explores the lives of women in servitude in the Cape Colony.
​

 

Lunch break.

 

SESSION 7 – Worlding Tiohtià:ke/Montréal in Exhibition and Artist-run Centres
Moderated by Analays Alvarez Hernandez and David Duhamel, Université de Montréal (WPC Montreal)
Tamar Tembeck, OBORO
Michaëlle Sergile, artist and articule
Helena Martin Franco, artist
Nuria Carton de Grammont, SBC Gallery
Genevieve Wallen, Younger than Beyonce and FOFA Gallery

The speakers of this roundtable will reflect on the transcultural, transnational, and decolonial issues present in artist-run centers and exhibitions in Montreal and on the ways epistemological and ontological decolonization operate in these spaces: what are the challenges, what are the successes? In what forms and according to what principles does the sharing of knowledges, practices, and beings take place within art institutions with smaller operating budgets than those of large institutions such as museums or foundations?

Moderators

Analays Alvarez Hernandez is an art historian and independent curator. Her research focuses on contemporary art, with an emphasis on public art, global art histories and diasporas, Latinx-Canadian art, and curating. She joined the faculty at l’Université de Montréal in 2019 as Assistant Professor in the Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques.

David Duhamel is an MA student in art history at Université de Montréal. They completed their BA in art history at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal) in 2021. Their research focuses mainly on representations of speciesism in contemporary Québécois art and their writing has been published in various exhibition catalogues.

Presenters
 
Tamar Tembeck is an art historian, cultural worker, curator and writer with a background in the performing arts. Her research interests include visual cultures of illness and medicine, as well as performance and media studies. She is artistic director at OBORO since 2018. 

Nuria Carton de Grammont is an art historian, curator and lecturer at Concordia University, specializing in contemporary Latin American and Latino-Canadian art. She has published several articles on Latin American art and presented the exhibition Gilberto Esparza. Plantas autofotosintéticas at Galerie de l'UQAM as a curator in 2017. She was interim director of Centre des Arts Actuels Skol and is currently Director/Curator of the SBC Galerie d'Art Contemporain in Montreal.

Michaëlle Sergile is an artist and curator working mainly on archives from the postcolonial period from 1950 to today. She uses weaving, often perceived as a medium of craftsmanship and categorized as feminine, to understand and rewrite the history of Black communities, and more specifically of women and communities living in diverse intersections. In 2022, Sergile was nominated for the Sobey National Recognition Award and exhibited at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, the Musée d'art de Joliette and the Off Biennale of Dakar.

Helena Martin Franco holds an MA in visual and media arts from UQAM. She is a member of several contemporary art collectives, including L'Araignée. Her transdisciplinary practice explores the blending of different artistic processes and the hybridization between traditional and new technologies. Her artistic practice invites dialogue about gender-based violence, immigration and artistic censorship. Winner of the POWERHOUSE PRIZE in 2018, her work has been presented in the Dominican Republic, Lithuania, Spain, New Zealand, Colombia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iran, Argentina, Cuba, and Canada.

Geneviève Wallen is a Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal and Tkaronto/Toronto-based independent curator, write, researcher, and workshop facilitator. She obtained a BFA in Art History at Concordia University (2012) and an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University (2015). Wallen’s practice is informed by intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogues, and BIPOC healing platforms offering alternatives to neo-liberal definitions of care. Her ongoing curatorial explorations include the practice of gift-giving, carving space for unfinished thoughts, and musings on the intersection of longevity and pleasure. 

 

Closing Reception at OBORO

 

 

Acknowledgments

CONCEPT & ORGANIZATION

WPC 2023 Montreal Faculty Team
Analays Alvarez Hernandez (Université de Montréal)
May Chew (Concordia University)
Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University)
maya rae oppenheimer (Concordia University)
Édith-Anne Pageot (Université du Québec à Montréal)

WPC 2023 Montreal Research Assistant Team
Manar Abo Touk (Concordia University)
Lorraine Doucet Sisto (Université du Québec à Montréal)
David Duhamel (Université de Montréal)
Varda Nisar (Concordia University)
Sarah Piché (BFA’21)
EAHR PLATFORM (Kate Bursey, Caroline DeFrias, Anne Kim, Meghan Leech, Nadeen Ajaleh)

SPONSORS & PARTNERS

Worlding Public Cultures WPC 2023 Montreal has been made possible through funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC). 

We would also like to thank the following at Concordia University for their generous support of the project:

Office of the Vice-President, Research and Graduate Studies
Faculty of Fine Arts Associate Dean, Research (MJ Thompson)
The Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art (Martha Langford and Brenda Dionne)
Department of Art History
Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories (Alice Ming Wai Jim)
FOFA Gallery (Nicole Burisch and Geneviève Wallen)
4th Space (Anna Waclawek and team)
Conversations in Contemporary Art (maya rae oppenheimer and Karin Zuppiger)
Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC)
EAHR|Media South South CISSC Working Group
Ethnocultural Art Histories Research Group (EAHR)

 

THANK YOU ALSO TO OUR COMMUNITY PARTNERS

OBORO Artist-run Centre, as our gracious host for Session 7 and WPC 2023’s closing reception
articule artist-run centre
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art
enuf Canada

ABOUT WORLDING PUBLIC CULTURES (WPC)

The Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation project aims to develop a critical art theory and practice-based approach to social innovation, which takes worlding as its central methodology. WPC is the first collaborative research project and platform conceived by the Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Culture Exchange (TrACE) network and funded by a Social Innovation Grant from the Trans-Atlantic Platform for the Social Sciences and Humanities.  

WPC INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS

TrACE Consortium (Transnational Arts and Culture Exchange)

University of the Arts London (United Kingdom)
Carleton University (Canada)
Concordia University (Canada)
University of Montreal (Canada)
University of Quebec in Montreal (Canada)
Heidelberg University (Germany)
University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands)

WPC Principal Investigators: Paul Goodwin, University of the Arts London, United Kingdom; Ming Tiampo, Carleton University, Canada; Wayne Modest, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Monica Juneja, Heidelberg University, Germany; and Alice Ming Wai Jim, Concordia University, Canada.